Empty Streets

This visual essay invites renewed reflection on the iconography of the people. In the spring of 2020, Guatemala's President Alejandro Giammattei prohibited citizens from leaving their homes to help contain the spread of the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19. Doing little to manage the spread...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Diacritics 2021-10, Vol.49 (3), p.112-125
Main Authors: O'Neill, Kevin Lewis, Rodríguez, James
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Absenteeism
Aesthetics
Citizenship
Coronaviruses
Crime scenes
Curfews
Demonstrations & protests
Pandemics
Politics
Presidents
Social networks
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This visual essay invites renewed reflection on the iconography of the people. In the spring of 2020, Guatemala's President Alejandro Giammattei prohibited citizens from leaving their homes to help contain the spread of the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19. Doing little to manage the spread of the virus, these curfew events gave new aesthetic and political meaning to a familiar visual genre: photographs of empty streets. For more than a century, and especially in the summer of 2020, images of crowds and mass protests have provided both governments on the one hand, and protesting multitudes on the other with an aesthetic representation of the people. But this interest in collective assemblies has tended to engage only one side of the equation. To fully appreciate the visual power of the people, it is also necessary to understand those images from which people are strikingly absent.
ISSN:0300-7162
1080-6539
1080-6539
DOI:10.1353/dia.2021.0028